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Awards

Refraction wins NHK Japan Prize

Presenting Refraction to the audience

Refraction, a game for teaching fractions developed by
CSE’s Center for Game Science, recently won the The Minister of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Prize for the Best
Work in the Primary School Category in the 38th NHK Japan Prize. The
NHK Japan Prize is an annual international competition for educational
media. Refraction placed first among the 60 entries in the Primary
School category, and was one of six overall winners selected from 313
entries from 61 countries. The jurors stated that “Refraction provides
a brilliant solution to bring mathematical concepts to life in a rich
environment that is fundamentally exciting while at the same time is
rooted in pure education.” The Center for Game Science competed with
major international broadcasting organizations such as NHK, BBC, PBS,
and the National Film Board of Canada. NHK flew CSE grad student Erik
Andersen to Tokyo to receive the prize and broadcasted the awards
ceremony throughout Japan.

Erik Andersen receives the NHK Japan prize

Refraction was created by CSE graduate students Erik
Andersen, Yun-En Liu, Eric Butler, and Seth Cooper, CSE Professor
Zoran Popović, and a team of CSE undergraduate students, artists,
educators, and game design experts. The game is accessible to anyone
with a web browser, can be played for free, and has already engaged
more than 400,000 players of all ages. A major goal of the project is
to leverage the popularity of video games to gather huge amounts of
data on how children learn fractions. Future versions of Refraction
will adapt to each child individually and present a variation of the
game most suited to the child's knowledge, learning preferences, and
misconceptions. The long-term goal is to show that such games can be
highly effective at making challenging math topics fun and to replace
math homework with game playing.

The Computing Research Association (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate
Researcher Award competition recognizes undergraduates in North
American colleges and universities who show outstanding research
potential in an area of computing research. Universities may nominate
as many as four students annually. In the 2012 competition, all four
UW CSE nominees were recognized!

Matthew Bryan (finalist) researches brain-machine interfaces (BMI)
in UW's Center for Sensorimotor and Neural Engineering. His
publications have focused on designing interfaces that can adapt to
BMI users, allowing them to be used for more complex tasks than any
previously performed with BMI. He intends to enter a PhD program in
computer science where he will continue his research.

Elliott Brossard (honorable mention) is a fourth-year student in
computer science and math, doing research with Professor Carl Ebeling
on creating a threaded object model for programming Field Programmable
Gate Arrays (FPGAs), which allows for the swift development of highly
efficient low-level applications. When he graduates in the spring,
Elliott will continue his studies with the fifth-year combined
bachelors/masters program in computer science at UW.

Stephanie Dietzel (honorable mention) has been working with the
Programming Lanuages and Software Engineering group. Recently, she was
listed as a coauthor on "Building and using pluggable type-checkers,"
which was presented at the 33rd International Conference on Software
Engineering. Stephanie will continue her studies with the fifth-year
combined bachelors/masters program in computer science at UW.

Hilary Worden (honorable mention) has been working for the Open
Data Kit group since winter 2010. She currently works on ODK Tables,
an Android app built to provide SMS-based data collection and
information services with low overhead, and designed mainly for use in
developing regions. After graduation, she'll be working for
Google.org's disaster response team.

This year's results extends CSE's record of having the largest
number of students recognized in the most recent ten years of this
competition! The winners join 38 previous CSE undergraduates
recognized by the CRA since the award's inception in 1995.

Congratulations to Elliott, Matt, Stephanie, and Hilary!

Two CSE alums receive 2012 Diamond Awards

Greg Badros and Anne Condon

Each year the University of Washington College of Engineering
recognizes five alums with Diamond Awards – the highest honor
conferred by the College. Two CSE alums have received 2012 Diamond
Awards – to be conferred at a ceremony on May 18.

CSE Ph.D. alumnus Greg Badros, an Engineering Director at Facebook
responsible for advertising, search, data science and data
infrastructure, will receive the UW College of Engineering Diamond
Award for Early Career Achievement.

CSE Ph.D. alumna Anne Condon, Head of the Department
of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a
world-renowned researcher in theoretical computer science and
computational biology, will receive the UW College of Engineering
Diamond Award for Distinguished Achievement in Academia.